MONITOR THE OPERATIONAL STATUS OF A ZYLINC SOLUTION, PART 1
Many organizations want to be able to monitor how their critical IT and communications solutions perform, so that they can quickly deal with any potential problems before many users become affected. If you work in IT operations or a similar function, and your organization uses Zylinc, this blog series is for you. It covers what you need to know if you’re going to monitor the operational status of a Zylinc solution.
In this post (the first of six posts in the series), we’ll look at how you get alerts if your Zylinc solution’s queues become too busy or understaffed.
First, what’s a queue? Queues are useful when your organization gets so many inquiries that your agents (that’s the people who work in your call center, etc.) won’t be able to handle all of the inquiries immediately. When that’s the case, you need a place for inquirers to wait their turn until agents can handle their inquiries: a queue. On a Zylinc solution, the most common type of queue is for phone inquiries, but your organization can equally well have queues for chat, e-mail, and social media inquiries.
If you have administrator rights on the Zylinc solution, you can set up queue alarms. With queue alarms, the Zylinc solution can automatically send out alert messages when a queue becomes too busy, when there are too few agents on the queue, or similar. You can get queue alarms as e-mails, text messages (SMS), or both.
If the system already knows the e-mail addresses or mobile phone numbers of the agents on a queue (which should normally be the case), you can select to send queue alarms to one or more of the agent groups primary, secondary, or standby (the latter is a special group of agents who are meant to help out on busy queues). This option is simple to use, because you don’t need to enter e-mail addresses or mobile phone numbers for agents who are already known to the queue. It’s useful if you have agents who may have forgotten to log in, or have failed to answer an inquiry, and therefore have become unavailable on the Zylinc system.
If the system doesn’t know the e-mail addresses or mobile phone numbers of the agents on a queue, or if you want to send queue alarms to addresses or phones outside of the standard groups of agents, you can specify a list of additional addresses or phone numbers to send queue alarms to. This is useful if you yourself, a call center manager, a general manager, or some other manager or supervisor wants to receive queue alarms.
You can of course set up thresholds and trigger timers, so that you don’t get spammed with unnecessary queue alarms.
Read more about how to set up queue alarms on Zylinc unified help. If you get a sign-up page when you access the link, simply fill in the sign-up form, and my colleagues in Zylinc’s admin office will give you access quickly.
The next posts in this system monitoring blog series will gradually become more technical. They’ll cover these topics:
- Monitor NTP service health (that’s time sync, basically)
- Monitor Zylinc Media server services
- Monitor relevant Windows services
- Monitor relevant Tomcat services on Windows
- Monitor SQL Server availability